I hadn’t come to Dracadia with any notion of falling in love with my professor, or Death, as some had referred to him. Perhaps that was the nature of the world, to take so cruelly, then swoop in and blindside us when we least expected it. There was an implicit truth in the dead teaching the living, though. It was my mother, my refusal to accept her death, to accept what the world had taken from me, that had brought me to Dracadia in the first place. And it was there that I’d faced death head-on. So smitten, I fell in love with him–his abrasive heart and blood-stained hands. The dangerous and
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